MOM 2006 journal for pdf.pmd - University of Michigan-Flint

It is difficult for many critics, as it is for myself, to confront this question without connecting
Bishop’s “driving to the interior” of the South American continent, to the journey of Joseph
Conrad’s Marlow into the interior of Africa. Knowledge for Conrad is gained by moving toward
the center of a country, yet Bishop’s suggestion of the same is put into question by the entire
poem which precedes it.
“Arrival at Santos,” like its speaker, is in constant movement; the speaker’s eye flits from the
water to the mountaintops, from building to building. Her attention then snaps suddenly, as if by
force, to entirely different topics. This is unusual for Bishop who is best known for the eye that
is “looking outside, inside, and around its subjects with an adroitly realized complexity of
perspective” (Travisano, Mid-century Quartet 58). The speaker seems to want this depth since
she grasps for detail at every possible chance: “Here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some
scenery: / Impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, / Sad and harsh
beneath their frivolous greenery” (2-4). As Cleghorn points out, it is as if “the poet is saying,
‘yes, those mountains could have emotions for all I know, as ridiculous as such a pathetic fallacy
may be.’” The attempts at insight are dismissed as “immodest demands” for immediate and
“complete comprehension” (9-10).
As the poem progresses, the speaker lingers the most on those aspects of the location she has
had a longer amount of time to observe. For example, the speaker delivers an unusual amount of
the short poem to Miss Breen, who she would have gotten to know on the eighteen-day boat trip
(20-29). Breen’s character is so thoroughly developed that she may have made a good subject for
the entire poem, yet her details are broken off by the physical movement toward Customs. As
long as the speaker keeps being interrupted she doesn’t have a chance to know anything about
Santos, but the potential is undeniably present. Jeffrey Grey sees the poem this way:
One is trapped in a bay, and the promise of access to an “interior”—always a pun in travel
writing, since voyages are notoriously journeys to discover oneself—is withheld.
If the interior is the journey “to discover oneself,” who is to say this act of self-discovery couldn’t
have occurred in the foreign land of Santos just as well as anywhere else? I would argue the
speaker of “Arrival at Santos” is not plagued by “being trapped in a bay,” but instead troubled by
her rushed departure from it. Santos might have had the same role as the interior the speaker
heads off toward if the stay not been so short. It seems Bishop’s interior is not geographical, but
a heightened state of understanding.
The tentative assessments scattered through “Questions of Travel” caution against claiming to
know anything that does not belong to the interior. The poems that follow still address unfamiliar
objects and people, but they do so with full awareness of a tourist’s perspective. This poem
provides a cautionary tenet for the author and reader to not make assumptions about unknown
environments.
The Risk to the Observed
“Brazil, January 1, 1502” is a sharp departure from the lightness in the two poems surrounding
it. Immediately the poem is introduced in context of the two sets of visitors to a Brazilian forest:
our 20 th century tourist, and the 16 th century Portuguese settlers. The perspective of the
Meeting of Minds 2006 47